“Unreal!!!” - Rich on St. Louis Cardinals’ Phenom Joshua Baez’s 3-Homer MLB Debut

Every kid who ever picked up a bat has run this exact dream in the backyard. First major league game. First pitch you ever see. You tank it.

Then the dream keeps going, because dreams do. Second at-bat, second home run. Third at-bat, third home run. Announcer voice in your head, narrating your own moment, running the bases you drew in the grass.

Joshua Baez did it for real this weekend, at Wrigley Field, in a St. Louis Cardinals uniform.

Called up from Triple-A Memphis just before the game, with 30 family members in the stands, Baez took the first pitch he saw from Matthew Boyd and hit it 449 feet. Since ESPN began tracking home run distances in 2006, only Jason Heyward and Aaron Judge have hit a longer one in their debut. Boyd had thrown over a couple of times beforehand, so Baez had been standing in the box waiting, and then he just connected.

He was not done. Second at-bat, gone. Third at-bat, gone again. Three home runs in a major league debut is a record, and Chip Caray got to make all three calls.

"First pitch in the show by Baez homers. It is not supposed to be that easy. Unreal," Caray said on the first one. By the third: "It is gone. It is gone. Three homers for Baez. Major league history at Wrigley Field."

The detail that says the most about the afternoon has nothing to do with the distances. Cubs fans gave him an ovation. He is a Cardinal, in Wrigley, and the bleachers still stood up for him. That is the highest praise available in that building, the moment where a crowd works through I hate you, I hate your team, I have no idea who you are, and then decides none of that matters because what it just watched was too impressive to sit on.

They also appear to have thrown the ball back, which is what they do, and which happens to be good news for Baez. He has the baseball. No horse trading required for a souvenir from the first time this has ever happened.

The performance did not come from nowhere. Baez hit 34 home runs in the minor leagues this season, so the shape of this was visible. The only real question was whether the call was coming this year at all. It came, and then he authored his own home run derby in his first game, in the same season a Cardinal won the actual one.

It all plays like The Natural, except the kid is in his early 20s instead of his late 30s, and the only thing missing at Wrigley was the woman in white standing up in the crowd to make it happen.

Nobody on this show knows Baez. Nobody knows his family. What everybody knows is that this is the dream, the one every boy and every girl who wants to be a major leaguer has run a thousand times in the backyard. It happened. Unreal.